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A theory of everything (else) | Jacques Vallée | TEDxBrussels

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    Thank you very much.
    It's wonderful to be back in Brussels.
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    I have been given the challenge
    of discussing with you
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    the next 50 years of physics,
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    in a dark room without windows,
    an hour after lunch.
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    So, I already see some of you
    recoiling in horror
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    at the prospect of equations
    and tensor calculus.
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    I'm not going to do that.
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    I've called my presentation
    "A theory of everything (else)."
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    Professional physicists today
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    are developing
    various theories of everything
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    to try to reconcile the two major
    successful theories of physics today:
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    general relativity and quantum mechanics.
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    There are a couple of dirty little secrets
    in there that they are not telling you.
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    The first one is that these two theories,
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    which each of which
    works very well in its own domain,
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    are in violent contradiction
    in most of our world every day,
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    especially with gravity.
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    Therefore, the idea is to try
    to develop theories of everything
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    that would reconcile somehow -
    like string theory and others -
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    would reconcile these two
    dominant views of physics.
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    The other dirty little secret
    is that in all that,
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    we have left out a missing child.
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    The missing child
    is the little sister of physics.
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    It's the physics of information,
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    and that's what I would like
    to talk about this afternoon.
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    The physics they teach us
    in college and in universities
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    is the physics of energy.
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    It has to do with lasers
    and colors and particles and mass
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    and fields - whatever the field is -
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    and acceleration and inertia
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    and all these things
    that you've been exposed to
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    in high school or college or university.
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    The problem is that they also teach us
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    that information and energy
    are two sides of the same coin,
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    but they never bothered
    to teach us the physics of information;
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    they continue to teach us
    the physics of energy.
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    Now, going back to the 19th century,
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    James Maxwell,
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    discussing thermodynamics,
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    took a very simple idea
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    that if you pour hot liquid
    into a cold liquid,
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    there will be an average
    temperature of the liquid
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    between these two components.
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    The only way to stop that
    would be for a little demon,
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    Maxwell's demon,
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    to be there and to separate
    these molecules.
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    But absent this demon,
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    the law of thermodynamics
    will say the two liquids will mix
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    and will reach
    an average tepid temperature.
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    Leo Szilard, who was
    a colleague of Einstein, in 1929,
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    went one step further and said
    for the demon to be able to do this,
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    the demon needs information
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    about which molecules are hot
    and which molecules are cold.
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    If the demon knows that,
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    then the demon can, in fact,
    keep the two liquids separated,
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    and, well, they will never reach
    an average temperature.
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    But that means that there is
    just as much information
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    as there is energy in the system,
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    and that information and energy are,
    in fact, the two sides of the same coin.
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    So, where's the missing sister of physics?
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    Physics of energy has to do, again,
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    with particles and atoms
    and fundamental forces
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    and mass and entropy and fields
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    and space dimensions - X, Y and Z -
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    and T - for time -
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    and momentum and inertia
    and speed and so on ...
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    But we never talk about similar concepts
    on the side of the physics of information,
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    and my argument is that
    in the next 50 years, we will.
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    I should disclose to you ...
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    I'm in a field where everybody
    works on full disclosure,
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    so I may as well confess to you
    that I dropped out of physics.
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    I have an advanced degree in physics
    only because I was good in math,
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    so I could work out the equations
    and get the answer.
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    But then, I dropped out of it
    for a couple of reasons.
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    First, I could never understand
    what they meant
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    when they said time was a dimension.
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    They say, "Okay, there is X, Y and Z,"
    so I get that from common experience.
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    And they say, "Think of time
    in the same way; only in the equation,
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    you put a little "I" in front of "T"
    for square root of minus 1 -
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    but don't think about that -
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    and then you treat it the same way,
    and everything works fine."
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    That's in general relativity
    and other areas of physics -
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    that's what you do.
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    I could never get that because in X,
    I can go this way or I can go that way.
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    In time, I cannot -
    I'm not allowed to do that.
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    So, we're very good at talking
    about how time passes;
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    we don't know why time passes.
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    Similarly, we're very good
    at talking about how things fall down;
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    we don't know why they fall down.
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    And again, this is not something
    you've been taught in physics in college.
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    They never said that they
    couldn't explain those two things.
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    The third thing that disgusted
    me was particles.
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    You know, we have particles
    inside the atoms,
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    and then, we have particles
    inside the particles;
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    we have particles inside electrons
    and photons and everything else.
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    And then, since it still
    doesn't quite work very well,
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    we have particles of sub-particles.
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    And that reminds me of something
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    that happened to astronomy
    in the Middle Ages,
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    when they had cycles and epicycles,
    and epicycles of epicycles.
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    If you keep doing that,
    everything works fine,
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    except that that's not
    the way reality works.
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    So I thought they should go on doing this;
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    they should go on
    with the physics of energy.
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    We achieve wonderful things
    with that science,
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    but that's not what I really want to do.
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    So I went back looking
    for the missing little sister of physics,
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    and it turns out it's asking
    fundamental questions
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    about the nature of time
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    and also about some
    of the things that happen in our lives,
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    like coincidences.
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    On July 20, 1996,
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    we had a house in the country,
    north of San Francisco,
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    a wonderful area full redwoods,
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    and we had some friends
    over on an evening, for dinner.
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    One of our friends was a woman
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    who said she was going
    to be in a play, in Mendocino County,
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    and in the play, she was going
    to read something in French.
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    She had not practiced French for a while,
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    so she asked us
    if we had a book in French,
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    and we had a bookshelf
    with English and French books.
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    So my wife pulled out a novel,
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    which was this novel by René Barjavel,
    "La peau de César,"
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    and she gave it to me,
    and I opened it at a random page.
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    I read a passage at random, which was
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    "I was in the Boeing that blew up
    after take-off at Kennedy Airport,
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    a bomb in the hold, 132 dead, remember?"
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    Well, this was three days after a Boeing
    took off from Kennedy Airport
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    and blew up over the Atlantic,
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    and we were shocked by this.
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    If you talk about this kind
    of coincidence with your friends,
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    you'll find that many people have,
    in fact, had that kind of experience.
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    This was not precognition;
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    this was three days
    after the TWA 800 accident.
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    But it shook us up and then we forgot it.
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    This is the kind of thing that you
    sort of brush out of your awareness.
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    Some scientists have thought
    deeply about this.
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    Going back to the Middle Ages,
    Facius Cardan, in the 15th century,
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    writes in his diary
    that he had performed some rites
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    to make the elementals of the air
    appear in his laboratory.
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    This was a very fashionable thing
    to do in the 15th century,
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    and these creatures appeared before him.
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    There were seven sylphs,
    the creatures of the air.
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    Two of them were the chiefs,
    and they came forward,
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    and he asked them what they knew
    about the nature of the universe.
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    It turned out the two sylphs disagreed.
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    One of them said,
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    "Well, God created the universe
    once and for all, and here we are."
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    The other one said, "No. God created
    the universe from moment to moment,
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    and if He should stop for a minute,
    everything would disappear."
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    So this clicker is not the clicker
    that I was given earlier.
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    It's another occasion,
    another instance of the same clicker,
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    but these clickers are being generated
    by something in a higher plane,
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    which as a software engineer,
    I understand perfectly; this makes sense.
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    It makes no sense in terms
    of the physics of energy;
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    it makes perfect sense
    in the physics of information,
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    and here you have
    the two models of the world.
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    You have the classic physical model,
    and you have quantum mechanics.
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    A number of people
    have more recently been looking
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    for the little sister of physics,
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    starting with Wolfgang Pauli,
    one of the founders of quantum mechanics,
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    Carl Jung - and there is extensive
    correspondence between Pauli and Jung -
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    Paul Kammerer, Arthur Koestler,
    David Bohm, Max Velmans,
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    Philippe Guillemant in France, Landauer
    and Seth Lloyd and many others.
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    Carl Jung argued with Pauli,
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    and Carl Jung compiled a catalog
    of coincidences that had happened to him.
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    In one case, he was
    at a conference in another city,
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    and in the middle of the night,
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    he woke up with a feeling
    there was somebody in the room.
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    He actually got up and checked,
    and there was nobody in the vicinity,
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    but he had the feeling
    of something hitting his forehead
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    and something hitting
    the back of his head.
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    He went back to sleep,
    and the next day he got a telegram
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    that one of his patients
    had committed suicide
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    by shooting himself in the forehead,
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    and the bullet had lodged itself
    in the back of the head.
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    Carl Jung, in his books, mentions
    a number of these remarkable coincidences.
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    I had another occasion like this.
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    In the 70's, I was concerned
    about the number of cults
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    growing up in California
    but also in France and elsewhere
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    around the idea of extraterrestrials.
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    Some of these groups call themselves
    the Melchizedek cult.
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    They use as inspiration
    the biblical figure of Melchizedek.
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    This is a representation of Melchizedek
    at Chartres Cathedral,
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    which is very beautiful.
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    Melchizedek is a very
    interesting, very mystical,
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    very mysterious figure in the Bible.
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    He is a very powerful figure
    because he initiated Abraham
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    and actually was the origin
    of all three religions of the book:
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    the Islamist, the Jewish
    and the Christian religion.
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    I was going to an interview
    in Los Angeles,
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    took a taxi at random
    from the flow of traffic,
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    got to my interview.
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    When I got home, I looked
    at the receipt from the driver,
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    and the receipt was signed Melchizedek.
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    Now, that got me
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    on a strange series of thoughts.
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    At the time,
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    there was research going on
    at Stanford Research Institute,
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    on parapsychology.
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    I was part of that program,
    the program of remote viewing.
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    Uri Geller was there.
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    Uri Geller thought that he could
    communicate with extraterrestrials
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    on board a platform called "Hoover,"
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    and that he was getting
    communications from them,
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    which enabled him to do what
    he was performing in our laboratory.
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    I thought, "Well, this seems
    to be the same kind of communication.
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    Something is communicating with me."
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    Over the next several weeks,
    I did a number of experiments,
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    and I convinced myself
    that these coincidences,
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    some of them mean
    something powerful, as Jung said.
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    Others mean absolutely nothing.
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    It's just the way the world is organized.
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    So let's go back and do
    a little bit of software thinking.
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    If you have a small library ...
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    This is the Library of Congress,
    33 million books.
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    Thirty-three million books is nothing.
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    I mean, that's what Facebook
    does in one afternoon.
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    Today, Google is getting
    35 hours of video per minute
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    uploaded to the YouTube site.
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    So, if you have a small library,
    you can still work with coordinates.
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    You have shelves,
    and you have vertical stacks,
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    and so you have X, Y and Z,
    and that works fine.
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    If somebody sends you 10,000 books,
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    you can push the existing books
    a little to insert the new books.
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    If you have enough staff people
    at your disposal, it works fine.
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    If you have a modern library
    which looks like this -
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    this is Google, Facebook, Twitter -
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    you can't do that anymore,
    you can't use dimensions.
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    You sprinkle the information
    that comes in, statistically,
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    in virtual memory,
    in an infinite virtual memory.
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    Then you have a hashing code
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    that enables you to get it back when
    somebody asks a question out to Google.
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    The result is statistical.
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    Some of it means something;
    some of it means nothing.
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    This is now starting
    to be mainstream physics.
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    Dr. Guillemant in France
    is a CNRS physicist,
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    and in his latest book, "La route
    du temps" - "The Road of Time" -
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    he argues that synchronicities
    are caused by a double causality:
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    our intentions cause effects in the future
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    that become the future causes
    of present effects.
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    Again, this is now becoming
    mainstream physics.
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    To conclude, there are four requirements
    for the new physics of 2061.
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    First, we should recognize the universe
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    as a sub-system of a mental reality
    of information structures.
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    It's all information structure,
    and it's all simultaneous.
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    I don't mean it's a database.
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    I don't mean to use analogs
    with current, crude technology.
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    It's something obviously much bigger,
    much more complex, but you get the idea.
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    We should recognize dimensions
    as a cultural artifact.
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    We create dimensions
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    because we have small libraries
    and we need X, Y and Z.
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    But we don't need them in physics,
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    so we should do away
    with the concept of dimensions
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    in the physics of the future.
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    The present is over-determined.
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    As Guillemant says,
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    it is determined from the past
    and it is determined from the future.
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    And finally, consciousness is generating
    the impression of space and time.
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    That's what space-time is.
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    It is consciousness traversing
    associations in this world of information
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    and creating the illusion
    of space and time.
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    So, my proposal to you
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    is that we let physicists
    continue with the physics of energy.
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    They do that very well
    and will eventually have a way
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    of reconciling relativity
    with quantum mechanics.
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    Let's go on and look
    for the missing sister.
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    Thank you very much.
  • 16:47 - 16:49
    (Applause)
Title:
A theory of everything (else) | Jacques Vallée | TEDxBrussels
Description:

As soon as you talk about matter and energy, you have to write down the laws that govern matter and energy, but information seems to require fewer assumptions. In the age of computer revolution, it is not a big leap to say that everything can be expressed in information. Jacques Vallee gives us an insight of the limits of physics and introduces us to the theory of information and how it is related to time and coincidences in our lives.

Dr. Vallee was born in France, where he received a B.S. in mathematics at the Sorbonne and an M.S. in astrophysics at Lille University. Coming to the U.S. as an astronomer at the University of Texas, where he co-developed the first computer-based map of Mars for NASA, Jacques later moved to Northwestern University where he received his PhD in computer science. He went on to work at SRI International and the Institute for the Future, where he directed the "Forum" project to build the world's first network-based collaboration system as a Principal Investigator for DARPA. Venture capitalist since 1987, Jacques Vallée has served as an early-stage investor and director of over 60 high-technology companies. Apart from his work with information science and finance, Jacques has had a long-term private interest in astronomy, in writing (as an author of several books, including science-fiction novels) and in unidentified aerial phenomena.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
16:57

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